Getting to the ribbon is a ball ache (technical term) and very time consuming not to mention fiddly and its not guaranteed to be the issue, i stripped the column down to its component parts to get to the ribbon only to find the ribbon was intact .
I have since converted the car to hydraulic steering
Looking at the ribbon its not easily damaged considering the steering wheel only goes round about 4 turns there is enough ribbon for it to go round about 10 times

Issue was definitely the steering,the steering light was on and no power steering
i just replace it with hydraulic steering from an E46 this was the second time i had steering issues and to be honest was at the end on my tether with it .was a toss up between selling the car or doing a permanent fix but as i owned the car from new in 2005 i was kinda attached to it .
1st time issue was with the motor 2nd time never found out what was causing it

Same for me, but the steering only failed when you turned left so clearly something had worked loose or similar. Error was 611C, which points to the torque sensor on the column rather than the ecu or motor.

As such, I removed the pinion gear from my motor and left the casing in place, maintaining the use of sport mode for the throttle as the BUS systems are still communicating fine.

The swap to hydraulic is reasonably easy in honesty, the hardest bit was routing the hoses in a suitable way, had to sort out a support too to keep the radiator return coolant hose away from the pump pulley, as its a good bit larger than the idler pulley you replace.

My local guy just stripped the torque sensor down to the last bit, as per the instructions given in the link a few posts back. I have the same error code as the guy that did the tutorial, but my problem isn't there.

The strip was taken out as much as it would go, around 1m, and no broken wires were found, wires were tested with an electrician's measuring tool for continuity and also for resistance (don't know the name of the device in english, it's a basic electricians' tool)

Below are the photos. I am stumped.

Is there anything else I can do? Please help, any feedback is gteatly appreciated...I can't believe I have to spend 2500 EUR on a brand new steering column...my car only has 100k km and it's from 2008!!!